


Clothes Make the Match

by archea2



Category: Heroes (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, But only in one part, Crossdressing, First Kiss, Hopeful Ending, Light Bondage, M/M, Romance, Sharing Clothes, Sibling Incest, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2018-12-23 03:51:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11981550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/archea2/pseuds/archea2
Summary: The deck is decked with a few items. Folding-chairs. A pinewood table. (Only last year, Peter had loved to run the flat of his hand across the pure, flawlessly planed surface – until Ma remarked that it was one of ten signed and numbered by Philip Starck). A pinewood sideboard. And before the sideboard, his back turned to the house, is Peter – wearing Nathan's sky-blue pajama top.And not much else.(A five-part story of struggles, stubbornness and sartorial I-love-yous.)





	Clothes Make the Match

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thedevilchicken](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/gifts).



> (First posted anon, then - after much editing and rewriting - made unanon, to honour those other wayward-carrying bros.)

There are twenty-four guests in the hall. All of them casting long shadows on a floor laid out in black and white, idling, pitting their Mid-Atlantic vowels against each other until they can give Nathan and his date a nice send-off to The Pierre.

And the first landing  gives Nathan a bird’s-eye view on them. Nathan Petrelli: son of the house, eighteen as of tonight, and thus tonight’s little global event. Now patting the white opera scarf round his neck - Ma’s gift, the last in a lineage of handkerchiefs ( _sniffing’s not a good look on you_ ), ties ( _blue – for now_ ) and repeated warnings that all the world’s a stage, with room for one only. Below, the growl of voices is louder; less willing to ebb into expectant silence. Jaw set, chin forward, Nathan stares down. Dad is unseen, but has to be there. Whatever the picture, Dad always manages to be front, centerpage _and_ behind the scene.

The scarf is a gift, but it's a prop, too. The rest of Nathan’s evening clothes fit his come-of-age body just as that body fits Nathan - like a glove - but the scarf is... focal bait, parading him to the guests. White bounces light. Oh, yes. He can see it already – himself, radiant, knifing through the guests in casual strides. Putting tomorrow’s man into motion. All he lacks is… 

He calls out to the girl who, so far, has been dating his mother’s vanity dresser. “Are you done?”  
  
And Nicole Chastenay VII (her great-grandmother funded the _Mayflower_ or something) hums back through lacquered lips. “Mm-hm. Landing clear?”

  
_For our grand exit,_ goes unsaid _._ Nathan grins at her; strokes one hand’s fingertips suggestively down the sleek white silk, narrowing his eyes for her blush. Then stops. The new noise is soft enough that it’s a near miss from where he stands. But there is no missing Peter’s tears, not even with Nathan’s little brother doing his valiant best to gulp them down, sucking on a five-year-old's fist.

Two strides bring Nathan to the door, still ajar. Surely, this is no hour for Peter to be awake? But the eye meeting his from under a shock of black hair is very much alert and wetly defiant.

“...Pete?”  
  
“I wanna  _go_ ,” Peter says, a sobbing rebel, then shortcuts Nathan’s “Well, the bathroom’s still where it –“ with the much re-Peted words, “With you.”

Trust Peter to taser his brother’s heart with all of two words. 

Quickly, Nathan leans down to where a stuffed Peter Rabbit is being slowly but surely soaked in toddler grief.

“Hey. Peter Little Peter. You’re not missing on anything big, honor bright. It’s just the Quadrille – you know. Dancing and stuff." Nathan pauses for dramatic effect. "With a _girl_. You’d be bored to death."

“Wanna dance.” When the ocean swell of betrayal rises in Peter’s voice, Nathan blows softly on the chafed cheek. It’s a pay-off: Peter returns a half-hearted dimple.

Then frowns and makes his point clear.

 “Wanna dance with you. Because it’s your spesh'l day.”

“I’d rather be here.” (Betrayal changing sides, Nathan brushing his lips against Peter's hair and its little-boy smell, Peter’s simple call for solace. The words are out before he can rein them in.) “This... it's just dressing up, Pete, only without a cape. And shaking hands. _Lots_  and lots of gross, sweaty hands. I –’  
  
“Na-than?” Nicole’s voice gusts in. “Your girl's getting toefrost out here!”

His next gesture is a what-the-heck one, that Dad or Ma would shoot down if they spotted him. But when he pulls back, and Peter’s small hands get entangled in his scarf, Nathan lets it slide all the way down and pool against Peter's cheek - Nathan’s gift now. Warmed by his neck and cologne. The clearer sum of him, left in Peter’s custody.

“Now I’m with you,” he whispers to Peter's ear. “No more tears, okay?”

…In the padded interior of the car, Nicole darts a glance at his bare throat; stops short of licking her lips in their present state of unlickability.

 “So. What d'you do with that nice scarf of yours?”

“Played peacekeeper,” Nathan says, his voice as firm as it will be four years on, his words “It's Bosnia, Dad, and it's non-negotiable”.

And Nathan smiles, but not for her.

 

* * *

 

The year is 1995. Year of the great Chicago heat wave, the ricin crisis, a 200-year life sentence for the Long Island Rail killer, the fall and rescue of Captain Scott O’Grady shot down patrolling a NATO no-fly zone over Bosnia.

Closer to home, Nathan is being subpoenaed to appear at the Vermont summer house.  _We have broken the Chardonnay and, if we are lucky, might break Peter from sulking up the gazebo. The woods are beautiful at this time of year, and your father wishes to talk with you_ , her coda all of this year’s letters.

Streaming along the train windows, Vermont looks as green and fresh as a chili pepper. As deceptively so. The heat is sultry and _everywhere_ – hot on Chicago’s heels. Making it, as Nathan finds upon his arrival, a waste of his time and money to have bought Egyptian cotton pajamas.

Peter just laughs at him. Peter's gazebo mood was over the moment Nathan slammed the taxi door and Peter tore down the wooden stairs, the boy in him still outracing the fifteen-year-old with the mane and manners of a Shetland pony.

"Nathan!" he said, his voice a boom, and Nathan tried to lift him off the ground, only to find that Peter's legs were all grown-up, too, and less inclined to aeroplane on command.

"You're catching up" had been the thing to say. Likewise, the later "Want it?", while holding out the blue pajama vest to a delighted Peter.

"You don't?"

"Never sleep with a top on." A racy _Unless she's a model_ flitters over Nathan's lips, left unsaid on shadowy second thoughts. 

"I love it!" Peter said, before he departed with his prize hugged close to his heart and a bow-legged swagger. At the door, he turned and tipped up his mouth corner. Fifteen tomorrow, Nathan remembered with a start.

"...Though it's not like you to do things by halves."

"Sue me," Nathan said - and, pat on cue, Dad showed up with a stiff one in hand and an even stiffer agenda for Nathan’s New York days.

It was midnight when he settled down at last for a stuffy, top- and sleepless night, followed by a mushy morning. Now, in a desperate bid for wakefulness, Nathan makes himself drop for fifteen; makes it fifty, the sweat glazing his tan in the already brilliant light. Its scent has covered the morning breath of insomnia when Nathan allows himself to step into the shower and banish both. Then, and only then, does he step onto the wooden deck which overlooks the beautiful lush woods. Family protocol dictates that breakfast be taken _al fresco_ , be it at fire-rain temperatures, and late risers be doomed to eat their eggs rubbery.  
  
The deck is decked with a few items. Folding-chairs. A pinewood table. (Only last year, Peter had loved to run the flat of his hand across the pure, flawlessly planed surface – until Ma remarked that it was one of ten signed and numbered by Philip Starck.) A pinewood sideboard. And before the sideboard, his back turned to the house, is Peter – wearing Nathan's sky-blue pajama top.

And not much else. 

The shirt sags fetchingly over Peter’s shoulders: loose, but not so loose that it buries him under, as it might have done when Peter was still in his sad-eyed, stick-limbed Bambi phase. But now... now Nathan sees how Peter's arms have bloomed into _lithe_ , how the flap of the vest brushes - almost reverently - the firm twin rise of Peter’s buttocks. One of Peter’s hands slips under the hem, giving a languid scratch to the - oh God, somebody teach these legs when to stop!

"…Nate?"

But Nathan’s throat is sundried. Nothing left there, only the pulse kindled by Peter rough-voicing his name. It tilts the familiar scene out of its axis, sweeps Nathan off the deck and freefalling out of control. The air around him is too bright, leaving only the fresh strong lines of Peter’s body visible and they’re no guidelines, except to a change in Nathan's heart that has all the speed velocity of a crash.

Peter turns around, clasping a piece of toast. His mouth is glistening with honey.

"Hey," he says. "Guess what? I know what I want."

(When Peter was five, Nathan took him to the local honey farm. It was supposed to be a didactic trip, a lesson on hardtasking so as to make the family hive proud. Peter, being Peter, had learnt the raw, rapturous taste of honey from the comb. And so "Give Peter a comb" had become the family joke in no time.) 

Again, that radiant grin, as Peter bites into the dripping toast.

"I mean, my other gift. But I’m keeping it for tonight. Tell you now, you’ll say no."

 _Yes_ to that _no_ is the sane option. Collateral against the next ten years. Instead, Nathan juts out his chin and barks, "Put on some pants, for Chrissake. You may be fifteen, but you’ll still catch it if Ma sees you." 

But Peter is looking over at the nearby trees. Where Dad had them build a tree-house years ago, when he needed the real thing to hardtask in. And Nathan ,in turn, looks at the smooth green canopy.

The deceptive green.

"Tonight," Peter says, a close-skinned presence in Nathan’s shirt. Too close. Too _here_ , making Nathan want to shove him, shame him, shut him out, even as his heart beats itself for it - dark, flagellating pangs, because Nathan loves Peter and cannot name this new onrush blistering his blood.

(Years later, catching sight of a strange girl clad only in Peter’s shirt, he will.)

 

* * *

 

He buys the shoes himself. Plain white Suzies, six and a half.

Nathan fibs to the salesgirl about getting a headstart on Mother’s Day while she gives a  _do not care_ nod, her eyes already flitting to her next customer. Nathan may be an up-and-coming D.A., but  _Newsweek_ ‘s Man of the Year he is not – yet.

"You’re _jo_ king," Heidi tells him, emphasis hers. He's noticed that in her, a tic for showcasing a fixed number of syllables in her sentences. Sometimes, it seems to Nathan that her voice is poking him in the ribs, a sharp memo of who his First Addressee should be in their (Ma’s) household.

Sometimes, it's a bit jarring.

"It’s _not_ funny," Heidi insists.

 _Not meant to be,_ Nathan doesn’t say. He flashes her a crinkled smile; gets hers in return, and thinks back to another party.

Halloween. Season of mists and merrymaking _chez_ Petrelli. Officially, a costume party to honor - in no particular order - Nathan’s newly-minted son, Nathan’s new job, Nathan’s notch up the power mountaintop, and everyone’s luck in witnessing the New Nathan Age (Peter – alas, within Dad’s earshot). Nothing grand, mind you. A family do, never mind that both Heidi and Peter have excused themselves from it. Peter... well. Nathan doesn't exactly know what to make of Peter these days. Eighteen now, his last birthday made memorable by the comer-of-age coming down for breakfast in a Greenpeace bandanna and mumbling,"Got a scholarship, folks. ’Gratulate me?", before he asked Dad to swap that trust fund for a donation to Crouse Hospital School.

 Peter and contrition: hardly a team effort these days.

Nathan says as much to his wife while checking that she's cosy in bed, pillowed and duveted, with the remote at hand. The in-home carer hovers by, waiting to unseal young Monty from the crook of her arm.

 "Give him more credit," Heidi yawns. "Crouse _did_ , after all."

 She shuts and opens one eye under an erring strand of hair. They make a pattern together, the hair and the wink, although a less frequent one. Once, they were _it_. On a rainy afternoon, in some boring museum café or other, she had winked Nathan straight in the eye, smiling from one corner of her mouth, and he’d nearly fucked her there and then. He’d driven her home, and then he’d driven himself into that dark-lashed tomboy until he was two shots away from blacking out.

 "You rest," he tells her now, a practiced husband and father. Eeling out of a Peter talk, because these go as well as that time he'd tried to sweet-talk Dad into giving Izzie its bath. They’re mates, Heidi and he, in more senses than one, but raising Peter’s ghost only brings up squabbles. She doesn’t get why Peter jolts him so out of poise, both when he's here and when he isn't. She herself _loves_ Peter on his short and infrequent visits, during which he props himself against the kitchen fridge and glares at them under his eternal crimson hoodie. 

(She doesn’t know that maroon-red is the color of the Vermont maple trees in late summer. That Nathan will always be "kept in town" in August,or that he never forgave Peter his baffled flinch, the day Nathan introduced her.

 "Are you fucking serious?" he'd mouthed, right when Dad and Ma walked in, reverberating praise and welcome. The next week had seen the announcement.)

 ...yeah, it’s all for the best, really, that Peter’s not here tonight.

Time for Nathan’s mind to show Peter out and zoom back on Nathan’s body instead. Fresh shirt, check. Grey suit, check. Nathan is not exactly dressing up, a matter of dignity, but he’s got himelf a new haircut. Parted on the side and swooped up with a little help from his coiffeur for a Kennedy visual. See? Nathan can take a joke – and twist it into a win. He doesn’t have JFK’s puffed cheeks and oval chin (his face is longer, lankier, a mixed genetic base with a topping of charisma), but the quiff looks good on him.

 And the quiff still stands proud an hour later, even after Nathan has ambled every female guest past the chic-o’-lanterns, their reds and oranges blending smoothly into Ma’s Italian house style. More often than not, he ends up ambling them to the pumpkin half that has been filled with ice to serve as a cooler. It makes the dancing less of a chore. Smile’em in, toast'em, smile. Wheel, bow, smile’em out. Still smiling, he steps up to the big mirror in the farthest, darkest nook. By now the sweat is running into his eyes, however carefully he dabs at it with his handkerchief. And so it could be the sweat, or it could be the chiaroscuro, but it takes Nathan another look before he spots the slender form behind him. The dark is toning down her night-blue dress, and the alcohol is taking the edge off his surprise. Nathan gazes into the mirror - gazes at the pale patch of face, the strand of dark hair that falls across it - and there's that joy, relief, that unbridled rush of recognition leaping inside his chest. The music floats up again, and Nathan turns and throws one arm open for his mate.

 Peter walks into the half-circle and puts a hand on his shoulder.

 A too-late pang. A pang, a panic. A sudden glide into focus, as if Peter had just walked out of Heidi and Heidi... was fleeting  in and out of Peter’s white face, while Nathan stared on.

(This has to be a farce.

Right? A farce, a freak show – a _joke_ , what else: Peter, out of his thrift-shop jeans, wearing Heidi’s best cocktail dress...)

But no joke could spark that confusion of guilt and truth in Nathan. No joke could impress the sense of Peter’s vulnerability, of Peter's exposed legs, shaved and naked, like his face above the dress's frilled neckline.

 A _parody_ , and Nathan should be striking him across the face for it, for desecrating... what? Nathan’s marriage? But what is Peter doing that Nathan hasn’t done before him, tricking the first girl he met who looked like she carried Peter’s intensity, Peter’s irreverent purity, Peter's incapacity for letting sleeping hearts lie. Who outraged whom, in true Petrelli fashion? Peter,of the dark, pleading eyes, or Nathan, who cheated on the truth with a little help from the law?

"Dance with me," Peter is saying. Begging from the heart. "Give me this, Nathan, oh god. Just this, just this once, and I swear I’ll go. Just - please. This, now, just look at me."

 Nathan looks at him.

The dress follows Peter’s willowy form without a crease. Heidi, Nathan thinks cloudily. Heidi must have got up from bed to tuck it for him, saying "Stand still!" while she pinned in the cloth. A conspiracy of two. And did she see it, that warped, androgynous _same_ , when she took a step back to admire her handiwork? Or miss it? Did she frown, did she offer her jewel box, lipstick, Chanel’s Number Five, anything to overkill the silly and blur the truth? If she did, then Peter said no. Kept his face all Peter’s. Oh, that limping mouth, flawed and unique, oh, that live theatre of emotions now that Nathan is closing a hand round Peter’s waist.

They move closer, slowly, Peter’s mouth and gaze still leveled with his.

  _Blue skies,_   _smilin_ ’ _at me,_

 _Nothing but blue skies I see_ …

 (JFK’s favorite song by Sinatra. He can make out Ma’s profile in the far corner, hawk-like, hovering near the pianist-singer. Like God, Ma’s in the details.)

"I think of them," Peter says with the breathless delivery that is all Peter, too. Peter could never be famous, because half of his words would never make it to the mic and the other half would be crushed by Peter's urgency. Oh, that raw, rough voice, sending unspeakable shocks through Nathan. "The skies. The great blue skies. When I think of you, which is too much and too often, it's what I see. Space without end. And nothing in it but you and the light. And me. You and me both, Nathan, staring at the sun. Like before –’

 Nathan squeezes his arm, a caution and a _yes_.

 Peter’s feet are novice, shuffling on the floor with none of Heidi’s quick-gestured grace. The shoes probably make it worse. They sway a little; stay put, in the shadows. Peter’s unquiet breath is fringed with whisky – unlike Peter, but like before. Like waking up in each other's arms in time to see the sun see the day, rising over the green tree-tops.

Peter's sour-sweet breath. Nathan wonders if it still tastes the same.

_Noticing the days hurrying by;_

_When you’re in love, why, how they fly..._

Cheek bent, eyes closed, he lets Peter’s deeper musk come to him over the indifferent smell of dry-clean. Lets himself hope, darkly, that Peter's scent will soak the silk to its very fiber, soak it and stay, and resurface the next time Heidi slips it on. He draws Peter to him, harsh enough that he can feel the silk crack under his hands and wonder what Peter feels, if he can sense the warmth of Nathan's hands under the strange fabric. 

 "Closer," Peter says, a mind-reader, and Nathan complies. The room has gone, evanesced, only the air and the music enveloping them. Let Halloween harvest them, then, before it throws them back to the winter days. They are turning, they are embracing, even their feet closer now that Peter’s arms are clasped in Nathan's back - uplifting him - daring the very air to slip between them from every angle, front and back and _under_  –

 The blame is Peter’s. The dream is Peter’s, trapping Nathan in his fantasy that they could float together – levitated, somehow - as long as the air bears that song. But the song is dropping, of course it is. All songs do. And the odd, sick pang of being grounded again has to be Nathan's. All Nathan’s. Whose else?

... He will never afford a dream that is not vetted by a Dad-figure. He knows that. But one thing he can afford is a pair of woman’s shoes, size six and a half, tucked in a night-blue box.

 "You just _can’t_ take a joke," Heidi says now. "Admit it." She leans across to fasten his seat belt for him, which Nathan tends to overlook. "Speaking of, Pete – oh, _all_ right, Peter - he never told me how it went. And I know you didn't kick him out of the room, because it was _fifteen_ minutes before he showed up to change again. All dark and mysterious. So tell me, what did you do – _dress_ him down for inappropriate behavior?’

 "No, no." Nathan shoos her hand away, gently, so the belt strap can rewind itself and leave him unsecured. "I danced with him."

She glances at him, once, and then she is silent. All the way to Peter’s flat. All the way to Peter’s door and the music behind it, brightly compelling.

 

* * *

 

Peter’s old trench coat actually fits Nathan. Nathan is not surprised.

He wears it on indoors, now that winter is general and Nathan can’t be bothered with Peter’s antiquated heater, or hot food, despite Ma’s attempts to prove herself a sharer and carer. She has meals delivered to him that Nathan leaves uneaten against her next visit. They do soup and gummy egg sandwiches around Peter’s block. Who needs more?

(If he gets thin enough, will he fit into the red hoodie, next? Peter’s had it for years, it has to have kept some of his warmth. At night, Nathan bundles it; tucks it between the couch’s stiff back and his unshaven cheek.)

"Turning yourself into his ghost." Ma looms in the doorway, gaunt, anger a buffer too. "And making a blotched job of it. Why, Nathan? Why?"

On his not answering, she changes tracks. "Wearing yourself to a shadow, so you can wear him. Peter. But how long, Nathan?" A pause. "He did it first. All those years, all those times I had to drag him, kicking and screaming, to a decent _boutique_  and throw away your hand-me-downs, lest his school start inquiries. He looked half starved in them."

She wrinkles her lips at him.

"And then, thank god, your father said it was time to put you in a suit. Peter couldn’t stand them. He changed. Surely, you –" 

"No, he didn’t." Nathan finds that he can hold her gaze after all. "Not Peter. Just, he bought his coats one size too large."

When the door has shut her out, he burrows again into the coat. Snow, all of today. Snow all over New York. Somewhere, out of his jurisdiction, Heidi is bundling two little boys into sweaters and woolen scarves. But all Nathan can do, if he wants to live, is to abandon his weight to these empty sleeves, these too-long flaps. It’s what Nathan owes Peter, in that last stand of faith: to bury his face into the hoodie’s soft-worn cloth and (Ma is wrong, as per usual) let _Peter_ wear his burnt-out self.

 

* * *

 

Later, things get a bit hectic.

He finds Peter alive. Next thing he knows, Peter finds himself a cap and shoots him. Twice. They ebb away, Peter and Nathan, understandably; team up again, only to fall apart over a gaggle of issues that factor in patricide, supering up NATO, and Nathan’s new girlfriend. Nathan crosses the asshole line by dressing Peter up in orange. Peter goes back to black. Nathan ditches the suits for a leather vest, but fails to impress his daughter. Peter gets Ma a jacket that turns out to be hers (reverse kleptomania? You never can tell, with this family).

Everybody ends up wearing casual for the Arizona family dig-in.

 And _then_ – just when he and Peter are on the brink of reunion  – godfuckingdam Sylar chooses Nathan as his career suit, leaving Nathan no choice but a direct flight to his Senate office.

 It doesn’t end well. When does it ever?

 It doesn’t end too badly, though, because Peter is the one who finds him in the bathroom and collects Nathan’s claim to really, seriously save the day.

 "O thank _god_ ," says Peter, and promptly sticks a needle into him.

When Nathan wakes up for the second time, they're in a room. It’s not a bath, mind, which has to score as progress. But this room, though white-washed and bathed by daylight, is small. It hosts an iron bed (single, old-fashioned), a rickety table, and a chair. No curtains. No peonies-and-pineapple decorative basket. Not _one_ courtesy chocolate. Nathan is bemused.

 "…that the Stanton?" he croaks.

 "Um, actually, yeah." The bed dips under Peter's weight.  Nathan struggles up, but Peter’s hand lands on his chest, pinning him down and out of vertical options. "Staff quarter," Peter says. 'Disused. We, uh, got a bellhop to let me in."

 "We? What d’you mean, we? I have no idea – and what are we doing here, anyway?" Nathan shifts tactics; grabs the iron frame behind him, two-handedly, and pulls himself up against the headboard. "Peter, I have to go! The President –"

"Is safe. Claire and Ma, ditto. Bennett's taking care of them."

"And who’s taking care of Sylar?" Now, with his head clearing up, Nathan can see that Peter’s changed his clothes - although they're of the same dark and drab persuasion as his general wardrobe these days. Yes, Peter has changed – and not just sartorially. Half of him stretched out on the bed, his hand still on Nathan’s chest, he displays an intensity in his face that Nathan hasn’t seen for a too-long while. It’s begging and compelling all at once, a testimony to their blood heritage, because Peter looks as if he loves Nathan more with every intake of breath and will go any league to anchor him.

As if reading him, Peter pushes a knee onto the bed and clambers it, straddling Nathan's body. "Sylar's being taken care of," he repeats. " _Not_ by you. No, listen to me –Nathan! You’re not up to it. Hell, flying’s not up to it. There’s only one of us that can measure up to Sylar, and he’s with him now."

"You've talked a special into facing up to Sylar? Alone?"

Peter - that new, that strange Peter - smiles, then lowers himself over Nathan with his arms braced on either side of Nathan's head. Making his weight a force field and a shield, as he bends his head to Nathan's throat, his words a murmuration. They waken Nathan's skin, a warm current of sound, as he hears _five years, Nate, it took me five years,_ and Peter’s mouth touches the strength of his throat.

"I have to go," Peter murmurs. "Check up on him – them. There’s the tranquilizer, should do the trick, and if it doesn’t, he, Sylar, can, uh. Switch him off, he says. Temp open surgery, sort of. _Then_ talk him down. Nobody else could."

This makes zero sense, but Nathan nods blindly. "I’ll go with you," he hazards.

" _No._ " Not a growl, but it takes all of Peter’s next breath.

"Pete..."

But Peter is pushing himself up again; moving his weigh to his thighs, his hands to his belt. Nathan’s eyes widen, and Peter looks down at him, his face intent with a dominant's plea, and says, "I forgive you, I do. I always will. I don’t need you to do penance for me, sweetheart. I need... "

He stops, the joys and sufferings crossing one another’s paths too quickly on his face for Nathan to sort them out.

"I need to know that you will _stay alive this time_." 

"…All right," Nathan says, humbled.

The belt slithers from Peter’s waist into his palms, its pure leather made supple by wear. It bends easily when Peter lays it across Nathan’s face first, across Nathan's mouth, the lightest gag. When Peter lowers his face again, his kiss warm and slippery on Nathan's cheek, the tips of his eyelashes, the deep-seated crease at the base of his nose, Nathan tells himself that the gag is a line. A not-to-exceed area for Peter's love. But then, Peter kisses the belt. Nathan can feel his own mouth opening, as Peter's tongue pushes the leather slowly further between Nathan’s lips, so the kiss will eddy down Nathan's mouth and into his chest, all the way, all the way to Nathan's self-beating heart.

Before Peter moves the belt on to Nathan’s left wrist, he kisses the wrist. Kisses the live, quick pulse; again; _again_ , then loops one end of the belt round the wrist and through the buckle. Nathan brings his other hand up, and Peter circles it, too, before he ties the remaining strap to the board. The belt is half as old as Peter, a call-back to days of gummy sandwiches and second-hand stores, when Peter wouldn’t take his brother's money. But now it doubles on itself like a Möbius strip, joining their hands in what is only a token show of manacles. There is no way that belt can keep Nathan put, and Peter knows it. They both do.

But Nathan said All right, and Peter is binding their trusts together. 

"Fifteen minutes," he says, looking at Nathan's released mouth. "I've left your Peter a text so he will know where to find you. When he does, I'll be - back in my time." A beat. "Keep the belt?"

Nathan nods; wraps his hands tight around the strap and uses it as leverage to hoist himself up from the hips and towards Peter. 

"I know." Peter is stroking his hand along Nathan's face, across his chest, a long goodbye. "Shh, I know. Just - keep him loved, Nate."

His steps echo for a long time in Nathan's ears as his head falls back on the pillow, and his fingers touch the keepsake leather, pure and twisted like their hearts, finally at peace while he waits for Peter to find him.


End file.
